Thirty years ago Steven Spielberg called Sam Neill and Laura Dern and asked them to be the leads in his pioneering dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park. They would play Dr Alan Grant, a palaeontologist, and Dr Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist. What was it like, I ask the pair, to be stars of a film where the real star was a livid tyrannosaurus? “I’m going to stop you right there,” Neill interrupts. “That is a misconception. These films have always been about people. The dinosaurs are bigger than us, but they’re just bloody bit players, thank you.”
Dern agrees and cites Jaws, a film about a shark remembered for its people. It was the same deal with Jurassic Park and that’s why Dern and Neill are back, for Jurassic World Dominion.
This is the sixth film in the franchise — an adventure 65 million years in the making, plus an extra 29 years since the first film. To catch up, the park that John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) wanted to open in the 1993 film was operational by the time of the franchise reboot with Jurassic World in 2015. That’s when everything went wrong and the dinosaurs broke out — which leads us to the new film, in which these brutes are all over the world.
Neill, who usually lives in his native New Zealand, is in his flat in Sydney. It is 7am. “I’ve already been to morning Mass twice,” he jokes. The 74-year-old is a blast — he named a ram on his farm after Jeff Goldblum, who played the sleazy brainiac Dr Ian Malcolm and also returns for the latest film. For Dern, 55, it is 9pm. She is in Marrakesh on a shoot. “I’m so jet lagged I don’t know where I am.”
When Jurassic Park came out I was 12, the perfect age for gawping at effects on a huge screen. The mosquito in sap. Velociraptors eating Bob Peck (“Clever girl!”). Samuel L Jackson’s arm. The characters were as much in awe of the park as the viewers — that was the trick.
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Why, I ask Dern and Neill, did Spielberg want you two? “Let me talk for Laura, because this is what men do in the patriarchy,” Neill says. He cackles. “Laura was a tender age. I’m guessing . . . 23?” “Yep,” Dern says, smiling. “And she was already an exciting actor — she had done David Lynch films. It was no surprise she was asked. But I was completely baffled to be called by Steven. I didn’t get it.”
Yet there was something off that neither realised at the time. “I am 20 years older than Laura!” Neill blurts out. Dern laughs. “Which at the time was a completely appropriate age difference for a leading man and lady! It never occurred to me until I opened a magazine and there was an article called ‘Old geezers and gals’. People like Harrison Ford and Sean Connery acting with much younger people.” In Six Days, Seven Nights, Ford, then 55, starred opposite Anne Heche, 29; and in Entrapment there was a 39-year age gap between Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. “And there I was, on the list. I thought, ‘Come on. It can’t be true.’ ”
Dern takes over: “Well, it felt completely appropriate to fall in love with Sam Neill. And it was only now, when we returned in a moment of cultural awareness about the patriarchy, that I was, like, ‘Wow! We’re not the same age?’”
In other ways, though, Jurassic Park was ahead of its time. Dern’s Dr Sattler was a rare bold and independent female protagonist — a scientist and a fighter. Dern compares her to Ripley in Alien and believes such characters changed our view of what female action heroes can be capable of. Think of Sattler’s line while sparring with male colleagues: “Woman inherits the Earth.” “It’s really moving,” she says, smiling. “A lot of women in tech and science point to a similarity between Ellie’s heroism and women in their field.”
Neill thinks blockbusters are smarter than they are given credit for being. He cites the author of the original novel, Michael Crichton, who through books such as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain showed a keen eye for how we can overreach with science. For Neill, Jurassic Park was about the GM crop boom, while Jurassic World Dominion comments on the climate crisis.
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“Jurassic films have always been a metaphor for the dangers of uncontrolled, shall we say, business interests?” Neill says with raised eyebrows. “And I’m not in any way antiscience, but one has to be judicious and careful, and Jurassic has always had that theme bubbling under it.”
Passion for these movies remains, even if the sequels never recaptured the wonder of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time. A Spielberg sequel, The Lost World, was bloated, and while Jurassic Park III was better, it ended rather abruptly, as if the money ran out. (“I’m not sure we ever wrote the ending properly,” admits Neill, who was in that sequel.) The 2015 reboot entertainingly imagined the park as a zoo and now the franchise finally ends.
Jurassic World Dominion is a huge film. “I have never seen action like this,” Neill gasps, but this is not entirely positive. In the first film the T. rex does not turn up for 45 minutes. That builds story and character; the threat of something that we have not yet seen. You lose that with relentless action.
“But an audience 30 years later wouldn’t find that pace acceptable,” Neill says with a sigh. “As a result this has action from the moment the lights go down. Though of course it has quiet moments.” “It’s very romantic,” Dern interrupts teasingly. “So romantic, my darling,” Neill says. I wonder if I should leave the Zoom.
I ask which lines fans quote to them most. “Life found a way,” Neill says. Dr Grant says that when he sees baby dinosaur footprints. It’s better than what Dern is remembered for: “Dinosaur droppings.” Dr Sattler finds an ill triceratops and delves into its gigantic pile of poo. We laugh at a viral video of a man’s gate that, when opened, sounds like the theme tune. The film is such a phenomenon it inspires nonsense like that. “Wherever I go, people might not know my name,” Neill says. “But they know I’m the guy from Jurassic Park.”
Jurassic World Dominion opens on Jun 10
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What came before — the Jurassic Park films
Jurassic Park (1993)
Spielberg’s original still thrills, even if its special effects are a bit less impressive by today’s standards. Sky/Now
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Julianne Moore joins the cast, but this Spielberg sequel is far too long. Sky/Now
Jurassic Park III (2001)
Joe Johnston directs and, in a bid to be different, the T. Rex is usurped by a spinosaurus. Sky/Now
Jurassic World (2015)
Twenty-two years after the original, dino-land has been transformed into a Disneyesque theme park. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard take the reins as the franchise roars back to life. Sky/Now
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Rather than parks, this film has a mansion that’s home to a man on a mission to sell dinosaurs as weapons. Buy on Amazon
